Well, let's try our own tests before attempting to rebalance things, yes? I mean, the thing I understand is that at this point in time, very few people have had the chance to fully explore the system and all its myriad tactics. I'm just really reluctant to call anything obviously unbalanced yet - I know others are doing so on various places on the internet, but I'm not keen on doing so because I do not really know the deeper implications of the system.

I feel like, as I wrote before, a lot of the perceived "weirdness" in 3e is from the specter of 2e's flaws - people are worried and making mountains of molehills, so to speak. People are overfocusing on the mechanics because they're perilously afraid - out of habit, mostly - that the mechanics are going to screw up the stories they want to tell. Maybe the mechanics will do that, but I think, from what I've seen of them and having never used them yet, that 3e's mechanics are far less likely to break stories you want to try to tell than 2e's were. I mean, the 3e mechanics may not support your story fully, depending on your ST and what story you want to tell, but even then I feel that they're better off than 2e's because, so far as I can tell, you've not got a similar "mess up one stat buy and you die 100% of the time" factor. Even in the example ChaoticSky's given us, I'm not sure that it's really quite true, because I recall that the devs have said several times that 3e's combat is really not ideal for representing a 1x1 "white room" battle, under any circumstances, let alone the ones described.

Well, in any case, I think my opinion on the matter's clear enough, so I'll stop here, but I still feel like trying to fix the system is premature, and will likely result in weirder issues raising their heads down the line, but I understand why people are looking to do this.

This is why i was lukewarm to Vek's idea of using the Brutal Merit... since all that would do is force people to pay even more (merit or bonus points), on top of a higher attribute investment, while not even truely bringing it to par... let alone rising you up the way youd expect from such a heavy investment.

Two important things.

1) The most important thing is that it needs to be balanced towards the optimized build. Brutal Solar has Increasing Strength Exercise - a scene-long die adder. I'm mostly not sure where to place it, point cost wise. At least you can't bunnyhop any longer.

2) I don't want to go with 'higher of strength or dex' because strength-based builds and strategies should genuinely, truly be their own thing, with their own unique flavor. A player interested in it may need to convince me of some Charms, but for now I want to see a few combats - thus my other thread on this. I may run an Exalted Arena on World Unbent to properly analyze this sort of thing, summon Exalted fans from Reddit and Onyx Path.

My primary concern is it looks like the devs have addressed some of the prior issues with Strength builds. I would like to see what tricks people might miss in their tests, for example.

After a few, I'll introduce a Brutal merit at some dot level, and see how it plays out.

Eep. As I am given to understand it, MA and Brawl were balanced with the assumption that they wouldn't be able to be combined.

No, there are already Brawl Charms that can enhance MA. The balance, I'm pretty sure, comes from only allowing certain effects to combine with MA, and not random combinations between any MA and any Brawl charms.Besides, MA have never been the overpowered option, for any splat except maybe Sidereals, and then only on higher essence than most groups were likely to ever reach.

Mostly, ChaoticSky is right, and I would have fully expected that test's outcome mostly without looking. Strength builds aren't going to be on par with Dexterity builds even if you could attack with Strength, unless you can also at least parry with Strength. Then and only then, Strength might come ahead due to Increasing Strength Exercise and the like. If the Dex guy has reasonable access to unblockable attacks, I'd expect us being back to at least parity.

As for houserules, I wouldn't be surprised. That's a game where people have told the developers that something is causing problems at their tables, only to be met with "that's how it should work". As an example, advancement rules possibly causing up to 135 XP disparity between different concepts is obviously fine, just play the concepts that the system rewards.And it's a game that historically relied on a combination of houserules and GM fiat .Let's say the combination of these two isn't conducive to the game being run RAW !

We know from 2e that Dex is slightly better, and if Withering attacks did direct damage, we'd more or less have something identical to what we used to have. Dexterity would be slightly better, but not significantly so.

With decisive attacks, we still use Dexterity for attack and defense, but we don't use Strength or Stamina. In effect, Dexterity is now even MORE powerful.

The damage of Decisive attacks depends on your strength, stamina, weapons and armour, though. It's just happening in a roundabout way, because they help you get initiative via withering attacks.Overall, I'd expect to see Stamina and Strength being slightly more powerful than before, but still nowhere near parity with Dexterity.

Okay, now I'm actually kind of debating whether or not to open up a thread as a preliminary preparation sort of thing - solely so that would-be players and I could hammer out character concepts and focus in more on what we wanted from the game. Not going to quite yet - probably later today, but I'll put a link here when I finish.

Just because it's been out for a week, and while I'm (definitely) not looking to start for another week or so, I'd like to open discussions about the game.

Now that I think about it, though, I have a couple of questions for my fellow would-be STs and players:

Do we have a final consensus on whether we want it to be a living world?

And do we have anyone else who would be inclined to doing this via a chat or something like it, or would we rather focus on PbP?

I think that you might be surprised. From what I've read (mind, this may be a unique experience) most of the combats only take about 3 rounds. That said, I'm not sure of the context of those combats, so you may well be right to be concerned. All that said - I feel like my own tendencies are to enjoy noncombat activities more than combat activities, so unless the characters are really dumb, they can probably get away without combat for awhile. But perhaps that's not desirable, I'm not sure.